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Almost by definition, TV syndication in the modern era leads us to wonder just where and when we’ll get to see a show online. For CBS’The Good Wife, streaming on third-party services will be a cornerstone of an uncommon, multi-step syndication strategy that puts the internet first. The drama will be available for Amazon Prime Instant Video subscribers starting March 14th, expanding beyond its existing availability for purchase. Hulu Plus members, meanwhile, will get their own turn at streaming in September. Traditional TV will still be around, but it’s notably pushed to the back of the queue — Hallmark won’t have airing rights until January 2014, and most other broadcasters will be denied until a year after Hulu. The new approach another sign that CBS’ one-time cold shoulder to some forms of digital distribution is growing warmer and warmer.

Amazon’s S3 cloud service has proved a popular proposition, with many large web enterprises happily depending on it (most of the time) to serve up its content. Now, the internet retail giant is offering a similar product, aimed squarely at archives, called Glacier. The idea seems pretty simple, starting from a penny, you can store 1GB of data on the firm’s servers for one month. You’ll only pay for what you store, and there are no upfront costs. Thinking this sounds like a cheap way to host your website? Well, maybe not, as retrieval requests are sent to a queue, and won’t be available to download for a few hours. There’s no limit on the amount of data you can store though, which is not surprising, but each individual archive does have a 40TB limit — so those DNA back-ups are off the menu. Retrieval is priced differently, with 5 percent of your storage (pro rata) downloadable for free, but beyond that you’ll have to pay. The service is available from today, with storage locations in the US, Europe and Japan. Full details of pricing can be found via the source.

While it was already live for many, Netflix has made its launch in the United Kingdom and Ireland officially official, streaming its catalog of entertainment for 5.99 pounds / 6.99 euros a month. Residents can queue for a one month free trial at the website right now, and at launch it works not only on PCs, but also the usual suite of game consoles, Blu-ray players from LG, Samsung Smart TV, iOS and Android phones plus smart TV adaptors from Philips, Western Digital and Roku. As for content, it’s sourcing from All3Media, the BBC, CBS, Channel 4’s 4oD, Disney UK & Ireland, ITV, Lionsgate UK, MGM, Miramax, Momentum Pictures, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox and Viacom International Media Networks. Like the Latin American service, it also includes Open Graph Facebook tie-ins that are apparently held back in the US due to regulatory concerns. Check the official press release for more details on what’s currently available after the break, or just hit Netflix to sign up and give the streaming a shot no matter which side of the pond you’re on.

Facebook average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25 (Facebook CPCs)

As a scientist, I like to run experiments. And I like to make stuff. So my team and I made a few Facebook apps that solved needs that we had (a few samples listed below) and shared them publicly on Facebook to see if they were also useful to other people too.

I beta tested some apps with a few friends by inviting them directly. Then to get it out to a larger number of people, we decided to try Facebook advertising, the much-hyped, holy grail of display advertising on one of the largest and most active social networks.

– create and send photo or video e-cards by drag and drop (Flickr and YouTube backend)

– social commerce – I’ll buy what he bought; things I have, things I want

But what I found was eye-opening to say the least. Despite the potential of social ads where the social actions of your circle of friends could make the ads more targeted, none of the anticipated positive effects were observed. Despite the promise of mass reach, there was not the corresponding attention or clicks. And despite the use of demographics-based targeting, there was no statistically significant difference between different targets nor the control sample, running during the same time period.

What we saw were click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% — and the 0.01% often seemed like rounding because they did not report more than 2 decimal places. As a result of these click rates the effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 and average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25. I’ve been running these Facebook ads for more than 12 months; and millions of impresisons later, there is no observable improvements to CTRs and thus CPMs and CPCs. But since I set up the campaigns to only pay when there is a click (CPC basis), I can let these run indefinitely because I am getting so few clicks, it’s not even making a dent on my credit card (which I use to pay for the ads).

detail of low click through rates of facebook display ads

Ideas for Facebook

In the spirit of openness, as an advertiser who wants to continue using Facebook advertising, perhaps there are a few things they can do to improve the effectiveness of Facebook display ads.

1. reduce the number of ads per page to 1 — displaying multiple ads artificially depresses click-through rates because users can only click on 1 thing at a time, even if they liked more than one of them. Displaying 3 on a page simply increases the denominator while the numerator does not increase — in the click-through rate equation: clicks / impressions.

2. make ads sharable – in the rare instance a user views an ad, it may or may not be relevant to her, but she may know that it is relevant and timely for a friend. By making ads sharable, she can click and send to a friend, who is very likely to find it useful and valuable, especially having been sent by a friend.

3. let users opt-in to ads in specific topic categories – when users are in the market for specific things, they are more likely to subscribe to pertinent news feeds, offers, etc. related to that topic or category. By giving users more power over what they want to see, it will also give advertisers more targeted and engaged prospects to target.

4. expand search-based advertising – when users search they are looking for something and are open to discovering something they didn’t know to ask for. So ads served up in response to a search is usually a lot more effective than ads served up simply when a page is loaded (display advertising). Facebook can serve display ads based on pertinent search queries.

Earth to Facebook… anyone listening?

By Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is Group Chief Digital Officer at Healthcare Consultancy Group a group of agencies within the Omnicom family specializing in pharma and healthcare. He helps clients develop digital marketing programs or improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness existing campaigns via advanced analytics, social marketing, and digital strategy. You can read more of his writing on digital marketing on this blog and follow him on twitter @acfou.

Excerpt from TechCrunch: “Click fraud is serious business on the big search engine advertising networks because the bad guys can make serious money. Sign up for an Adsense account and put those ads on parked domain names or wherever. Then all you have to do is start clicking those ads like crazy, using bots or cheap labor.” On Facebook, “advertisers are clicking on competitor ads to drive up their costs and drive down their ROI.”

“So the bad guys just create thousands of fake Facebook accounts with a wide variety of demographic information. This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s highly automated. the going rate was just $10 per 100 accounts if you supply the unique email accounts. Once the accounts are created, they use software to fill out the varied demographic information, and that software also manages all these accounts. The fraudster then logs in to Facebook via these accounts and views the ads that are displayed. The right competitive ads come up and Bingo, the software then clicks them. Facebook rules allow an account to click any advertisement up to six times in a 24 hour period, and all those clicks are charged. All you need is a few accounts to view the ads and then click to the max.”

Quite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.

First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:

This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.

Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:

Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.

He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.

The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:

Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.

From AllFacebook:

Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.

And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:

Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.

Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?

We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.